Revised Bolognese

The Bolognese alla Quarentena has to be one of my most cooked sauces here at home, and a few weeks ago, I made a change to the recipe that merits more than a quick footnote update to the original recipe. The alla Quarentena, as I’ve been preparing it, has always been with a rather lean ground turkey, but traditional Bolognese is made with ground beef (honestly, I don’t remember the last time I worked with ground beef), so I’ll make two changes to the alla Quarentena here: 1) ground turkey will revert back to the original traditional ground beef, and 2) I’ll make the signature change that differentiates this recipe from my other one.

This recipe begins the same way, by sauteing 1 pound of ground beef (a good ground chuck is best). Beef has a significant advantage over turkey: it’s a lot fattier. The most common ground beef sold here in the United States is 80/20. That is, 80 percent of the meat is protein and 20 percent is fat. In general, this is the perfect ratio of ground beef for almost anything. If one of my recipes calls for ground beef, you can safely assume I want you to use 80/20 unless I say otherwise. The ground turkey I’ve worked with, on the other hand, is 93/7. Poultry in general is leaner than beef or pork, but even by poultry standards, this is very lean. (So lean, in fact, that I don’t think I could find beef that lean without going to a specialty butcher shop; most ground beef is 90/10 or higher.)

This higher fat content of the ground beef over the ground turkey (20% versus 7% means that the beef is basically 3 times fattier than the turkey) is important for three reasons: Fat is a barrier that allows for even heat transfer from the cooking surface to the protein. Without that barrier to move the heat from the pan to the food, it cooks unevenly. If that barrier doesn’t exist, I need to create it by adding fat into the system myself, which comes in the form of olive oil. Second, cooking an animal (in any form—ground, as a steak, etc.) in its own fat adds another complex dimension of flavor that is impossible to replicate when cooking an animal in some other fat. With fatty beef, most of the fat is in the beef, and it can be rendered out and used to cook the beef with close to no additional fat. Doing this allows the “beefiness” of the beef to shine, whereas with the turkey, since that fat basically isn’t there, the fat isn’t turkey fat, but olive oil. Don’t get me wrong, I like olive oil, but cooking turkey in olive oil (which obviously isn’t the turkey’s own fat) doesn’t give as robust a flavor to the turkey as the method for the beef. Third, fattier meat stays moister longer. This is why, in general, it’s really easy to prepare a filet mignon terribly, but it’s almost impossible to mess up a brisket in that sense. Beef has more fat than turkey, so I have to put in less effort to keep the beef itself just as good as the sauce it’s sitting in compared to the work I have to do to have the same effect on the much leaner turkey.

In any case, the first step to any good Bolognese is browning the protein of choice. For reasons that will become apparent later, do this in an oven-safe vessel. Whether I use this method or my older method, my preferred vessel of choice anytime I make a Bolognese is my 8-quart stainless steel Dutch oven, but you don’t necessarily need a Dutch oven; anything big, heavy, and oven-safe should do the trick. Protein expels water from within its cells at first, and at this point, it looks gray and, frankly, quite unappealing. However, if you’ve been cooking long enough, you’ll start learning to recognize the different sounds proteins make when they’re expelling that water versus when they’re frying in the fat you put in the pan (or which they already naturally contain). Listen for that sound to change, and with it, watch for the color to change. This is one of the points where I deviate from the original Bolognese alla Quarentena, and one of the keys to making this recipe successful. When you start browning the meat, preheat your oven to 250 Fahrenheit. By the time you finish browning the meat and preparing everything else, your oven should be up to temperature. And even if it’s not quite there yet, that’ll be okay—more on that in a few paragraphs.

This sauce is quite simple, and rather similar to the alla Quarentena sauce or the Sauce Tomate I posted in October when I covered the French Mother Sauces. In a food processor, combine 1 large yellow onion, 6 cloves of garlic, 1 large red bell pepper, and 6 Roma tomatoes, and keep the processor running until the sauce is as smooth as possible, given you’re using a food processor and not a blender. Place the sauce into the vessel you have chosen, where the browned meat should already be. Add to that enough water so that you have 3 parts tomato mixture to 2 parts water. Season this with freshly cracked black pepper, dried oregano, dried dill, dried thyme, dried basil, garlic powder, and onion powder. Stir to combine all the spices and to make sure nothing has burned on the bottom or sides. Place this sauce into the oven (which, again, should be set to 250 Fahrenheit). As mentioned before, it’s totally fine if your prep work is quicker than the time it takes your oven to hit 250. If that happens to be the case, just put the oven-safe vessel into the oven and let it go. In any case, leave the sauce in the oven for at least 1 ½ and up to 4 hours. Resist the temptation to open the oven door for any reason; don’t look at it, don’t stir it, don’t rotate the pan, don’t add more liquid. Leave it alone. This, I think, is one of the areas where home cooks struggle the most: knowing what needs constant babysitting and what can be left alone for hours on end. There’s a ton of liquid in that vessel. Nothing is going to burn, and the oven is at such a low temperature that you don’t have to worry about the reduction process. This is absolutely a recipe that can be left alone.

Up to 4 hours after it went into the oven, turn the oven off and remove the sauce. Stir the sauce again and taste it. Only now, salt it and taste it again. This sauce should never be salted ahead of time (i.e., when you’re preparing it to go into the oven) for two related reasons: 1) temperature and 2) time. I don’t know how accurate your oven is (and, truthfully, you probably don’t know either), and I have no way of knowing how long your sauce will stay in the oven. These are the two variables that control how much something reduces, and reduction is an accelerating process. So if something tastes good before reduction and it reduces just a little bit in my oven, it’ll be okay. But if that same dish tastes good before reduction and it reduces by tenfold in your oven, it’ll be inedibly salty by the end. If you know you have to reduce something, or you even think about reducing it, hold off on salting it until you’re satisfied with the final volume.

As with the original recipe, the ideal serving companion to this sauce is a long, wide, dry pasta, like a good tagliatelle, pappardelle, or fettucine. Cook those according to the package instructions, combine with the sauce, mix, and serve.

French Onion Soup

French Onion Soup is a classic rustic French soup perfect for a cold winter’s day. Done properly, start to finish, this soup can take up to 48 hours, so most people are very intimidated by it. But since most of that work is passive, this is actually a very simple recipe that every home cook should know.
Onion soup is so time-consuming because of the soup base, namely, a beef stock. Beef stock is made with beef bones and, at the lowest of simmers, takes anywhere from 16 to 48 hours of stove time. I have a chicken stock recipe already uploaded, and you can find that by clicking here. The process for beef stock is nearly the same: roast the bones and the aromatics, add a lot of water to a tall pot with as much volume as possible, and let it simmer as gently as possible for as long as possible. If you want, you also have the option of following the stock recipe exactly by using chicken wings to make chicken stock, even though the traditional version of the soup uses beef stock. If you are vegetarian/vegan, I suppose you could make this soup entirely vegan by roasting vegetables and mushrooms, adding water and soy sauce, and simmering that to make a vegetable stock to serve as a base.
 

Cut 3 pounds of yellow onions in half pole-to-pole, that is, through the root and the stem ends, like I always recommend for when they are to be chopped. Peel the onion halves, and then cut them thinly, once again pole-to-pole. If you have a mandolin slicer, use it, but be sure to put on a hand guard first, since mandolin blades can be very sharp. If you use a knife, make sure your blade is sharp, not only because sharper blades are safer, but also because sharper blades disturb fewer cell walls and are thus less likely to make you or anyone else around you cry as you slice the onions. Once all the onions have been sliced, melt a whole stick of butter. Once the butter has melted but has not started browning, place all the onions into a large pan or Dutch oven.

Caramelize the onions slowly, over medium-low heat. Stir constantly. Caramelization is not a linear process, so you should never step away from caramelizing onions. Watch and stir them constantly from anywhere between 30 and 60 minutes, depending on how much moisture your onions need to expel before they start taking on color.

If you have any, when the onions are almost done, you can deglaze the pan with sherry or cognac. Otherwise, use an equivalent amount of water (2-3 ounces) to deglaze the pan. The caramelization process certainly created fond—the chef’s dream, the sticky flavorful bits that get stuck to cooking surfaces, just waiting to be dissolved. Deglazing a cooking surface picks up that fond with a liquid and dissolves the fond into that liquid, so no flavor is lost. The onions have finished caramelizing when they are deep mahogany brown, have an almost jammy consistency, and are about to burn but have not yet. Monitoring the onions as they get closer and closer to this point is essential. I’ve said it already, but it is worth repeating you CANNOT walk away from caramelizing onions, or they will burn.

For 3 pounds of onions, I recommend about half a gallon of stock. Add the stock to the onions, and let simmer, stirring occasionally for 25 minutes. Once the stock goes in, you can afford to step away, only checking every five minutes or so. There’s a gallon of liquid in your pan/Dutch oven, so surely nothing will burn because there’s no way that a gallon of liquid will evaporate, since the liquid is only simmering, and for not even half an hour. Check for seasoning and adjust as normal, bearing in mind that my stock recipe never called for salt precisely so that at a moment like this, you could season your soup to your liking.

In the meantime, figure out how many portions of soup you will be serving right away (this soup is great for leftovers after the fact, but right now, handle however many people you’ll be feeding right away). Find that many oven-safe ramekins or bowls and cut slices of baguettes about ¾ of an inch thick so that the tops of all those dishes can be covered in bread. At the same time, grate enough Gruyere to generously cover all of the bread.

When 25 minutes have elapsed, the soup is ready to be portioned into the ramekins. Top the soup with the bread, and then top the bread with the cheese. Place the filled ramekins on top of a baking sheet and place the baking sheet into an oven with the broiler (“grill” if you speak non-American English) on high. Check on the soup after 90 seconds, and every 15 seconds thereafter. The objective is for the cheese to take on some “leoparding,” that is, for it to look like the cheese on top of a well-made cheese pizza: taking on some color but not burned. Once you are satisfied with the degree of melting and leoparding of the cheese, turn off the broiler, carefully remove the ramekins from the oven and serve.

(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Cream of Mushroom Soup

Cream of mushroom is a great soup to have on hand for the winter, and it’s actually one of the simplest soups to make. There are three components to good cream of mushroom: a good bechamel, sauteed mushrooms, and good duxelles.

Whether someone recommends washing mushrooms in an application like this can be quite a point of contention, and, putting this out on the internet, I fully recognize I might be putting myself in a position to have a heated discussion in the comments below. For several years, I was of the opinion that white, baby bella, or cremini mushrooms shouldn’t be washed per se, and that they should just be scrubbed with a moist paper towel to remove any grime that might be on the surface. But now, after dozens of experiments, I’ve concluded that washing mushrooms by submersion makes no difference to the saturation when compared to the moist-paper-towel-scrubbing method. Personally, then, I’ve returned to submerging the mushrooms, but if you would like to, feel free to scrub them individually.

Cream of mushroom makes use of the whole mushroom—the cap and the stem. But unlike other dishes I’ve developed that use mushrooms (like this stroganoff), the cap and stem are not used together. For this, we need to separate the cap and the stem from each other. This is a simple process that can certainly be done by hand. To do this, I like to place the cap of the mushroom in my non-dominant hand; grab the stem with my dominant hand, and then gently twist clockwise until the cap and the stem have come apart. Keep the caps on your cutting board and go ahead and place the stems in your food processor.

Peel and quarter one large yellow onion, and peel half of a head of garlic, placing both the onion and the garlic with the mushroom stems. Run the food processor until the mushroom stems, onion, and garlic cloves have become a relatively homogenous paste. This will eventually become the duxelles.

Slice the caps into relatively even pieces; in general, cutting each cap into 3 to 4 pieces should be a good size. Smaller-than-average mushrooms should be cut only in half, and larger-than-average mushrooms can be cut into up to 6 pieces. Coat the bottom of a Dutch oven or large saucepan (at least 4-5 quarts) with a thin film of oil. When the oil begins to shimmer, place the sliced caps in the oil. Be careful to avoid splatter. Water in the mushrooms may splatter when it hits the hot oil, so a burn hazard certainly exists at this point. Early in this process, there is no risk of the mushrooms burning, but as they expel water and begin to sauté, these mushrooms need progressively more attention. The sound you’ll be hearing when the mushrooms expel water versus when they sauté will be different, and you’ll learn to recognize the different phases of the cooking process by experience. Once the mushrooms start to sauté, add 2 tablespoons of balsamic vinegar, and let the vinegar cook down a little with the mushrooms, taking care not to burn anything. Season with salt, freshly cracked black pepper, dried thyme, and dried dill. After a few more minutes, transfer the mushrooms and the vinegar to a separate heat-safe container.

In the same pan, cook down the mushroom stalk-onion-garlic paste from the food processor. Season the paste with salt and freshly cracked black pepper. Once most of the moisture has come out of the onions and garlic (this requires constant stirring since the pieces are so much smaller than the pieces of the caps), reserve this to a separate container. This is the duxelles.

For the last time, start over with a clean pan, being sure to remove anything that may have burned to this point. Build a béchamel using the method I’ve outlined here. Once the béchamel is ready, return the duxelles and the mushrooms caps to the pan. Stir. Adjust the consistency of the soup and check for seasoning. Adjust the consistency and/or the seasoning if necessary.

(Photo credits to Cafe Delites)

Pico de Gallo

Chances are, you’ve been to a Mexican restaurant at least once; and if you have, I can virtually guarantee you’ve eaten and enjoyed the dish we’ll cover this week: salsa, specifically, pico de gallo. The world is your oyster when it comes to salsas. “Salsa” is literally “sauce” in Spanish, even though a salsa doesn’t look like what you probably imagine a sauce to be: a relatively thick, flavored liquid like the ones I covered in my recent Mother Sauces series.

A basic pico de gallo salsa contains a few basic elements: a tomato, something spicy, an onion, and something acidic. This is wonderful for new cooks who don’t have much experience handling ingredients or knives. Pico de gallo ingredients must be chopped by hand and not in a food processor or blender, so a pico is a simple and safe way to get plenty of practice holding and using a good chef’s knife.

Every new chef needs to learn to trust and respect his or her knives; they can be extremely helpful if you know how to use them, but you can’t be reckless with or around them. Knives also cannot do the impossible; if you ask of a knife something it cannot do, you may get seriously hurt. Be careful. There’s no harm or shame in being careful. I hurt myself peeling potatoes Christmas Eve 2020, so now, with no shame whatsoever, I wear Kevlar gloves when I work with vegetable peelers. This is perfectly fine. There is no shame in doing anything to keep yourself safe. Speed and precision like the chefs on TV or the internet will come, but before that, you must be safe. Prioritize safety above all else.

Knife safety comes in three parts. First, a dull knife is unsafe, and a sharp knife is safe. Use a honing rod and/or a whetstone on your knives every few weeks or months, depending on how often you use them. Keep them sharp, and they will keep you safe. High-quality knives and high-quality steels and/or stones can literally last long enough to become family generational heirlooms. Second, how you hold the knife. At some point, you’ll notice the blade and the handle meet. With the index finger and thumb of your dominant hand, pinch the knife at the blade at that point, and curl your three remaining fingers behind them on the handle. Hold the knife firmly, but you don’t need a tense “death grip” on it either. Be in control but stay relaxed. Controlled and relaxed is safe, controlled and tense is unsafe. Finally, how you hold the food. Always hold whatever you are cutting with your non-dominant hand, and hold your food with your dominant hand. Use what I call a “three-layer claw grip” to hold the food. As with the knife, be firm but be relaxed. Raise your non-dominant hand like you see people doing when they get sworn into office. Now, curl your fingers down so each one looks like it only has its first knuckle (the biggest one, closest to where each finger joins with the hand) still pointing up. Put your hand in this position flat on a table with the back of your hand facing up. Your palm should touch your table. Raise your palm slightly so your fingernails go from completely touching your table’s surface to being perpendicular to it. You now have a claw grip. Furthest out in front is the middle finger, then the index and ring fingers, then the thumb and pinky. Keeping your fingers curled like this is the safest way to hold the food so it doesn’t move while you’re cutting, and the best way to keep your fingers away from the action of the knife.

Find a few tomatoes on the vine, wash them, and pull them off the vine. Using a sharp knife and this claw grip, cut each tomato through its stem end (straight down through where the vine was attached). Turn each half of the tomato cut-side down (we always want to cut things with flat surfaces; this is why we cut two hemispheres, not one sphere, as much as possible). Now, find the stem end in the middle and cut directly through it, creating a left half and a right half. Cut each half in half along its long side once more. Now, turn your board 90 degrees, and cut parallel to the “short” side of these segments of tomato three or four times, depending on the size of the tomato and your skill with the knife. Repeat this with all your tomatoes. Once this is done, your tomatoes have been diced. Set them aside.

Now, dice a red onion. Onions have two ends: one is fuzzy, and that end will be called the “root end” from now on. The other end has some strands of onion peel coming up in a mass together. That end will be the “stem end” from now on. Find the middle of the onion, cutting it in two from stem to root. You should have a left half and a right half with otherwise intact stem-halves and root-halves. Lay each half flat on your board, and cut the stem end off, but LEAVE THE ROOT END INTACT OR THIS METHOD WILL NOT WORK. Peel away all the onion paper and the first layer of the onion. Rotate this stemless, peeled half-onion so that the stemless side faces you and the root half is facing away from you. Carefully place your knife parallel to your cutting surface and make 2 or three cuts. The onion should still be together, but now the half should have a “top third,” a “middle third,” and a “bottom third.” Now, starting very close to the root BUT NOT GOING THROUGH IT, cut down the length of the onion. Make as many or as few cuts as you like. For salsa, I usually make six to eight of these cuts, but for sauces like my variation of Sauce Tomate, I have made as many as 14 of these cuts. Turn the board 90 degrees and start making cuts from the stem side all the way until just before the root. Stop as close to the root as possible to minimize waste. Once you have done this to all the halves of all of your onions, they are ready.

Every pico has some kind of pepper. For those of you who like heat, follow these instructions on a jalapeno or your pepper of choice. If you want the mildest possible pico, use a bell pepper, either red or green. Cut off the top to remove the stem but cut close to the stem to minimize waste. If you find you cut off too much, then cut around the stem to save the flesh you cut off too. Cut along the length of the pepper. You should now have two long halves of peppers that should have lots of seeds and pith inside. Remove those, unless you have a hotter pepper and you want to keep them in deliberately, knowing that the pith is where most of the capsaicin (the chemical that makes spicy peppers spicy) is stored. The peppers so the skin is on the cutting board, and now cut along the length of each half-pepper to make sticks. Cut parallel to those sticks to dice the pepper. The spicier the pepper, the finer your dice should be.

Use a Microplane grater to zest as many limes as you would like—as many as you think you need to balance the heat from the peppers and the pungency of the onion. Be careful to only remove the colored zest with the grater, not the white pith. The zest has several aromatic flavoring oils. The pith, on the other hand, is extremely bitter and unpleasant.

If you want to add anything else to your salsa (I’ve seen salsas that include peaches, mangoes, pineapples, and other fruits), now would be a good time to cut them. I can’t possibly guess all the additions every reader would try in their salsa, so I won’t give specific instructions on how to cut any of them. But I will reiterate this: the general principles of creating flat surfaces as quickly as possible, using the claw grip, and cutting one axis (x, y, z) at a time of the cubes that make up dice are always good guidelines.

Under-seasoning food is probably the most common mistake home cooks make. Use the learning experience of making salsa to correct this. Add some salt and freshly ground pepper. Taste the salsa. See if it needs more salt, pepper, or more acidity from the lime. Compensate as necessary. Learning to taste food as it is being prepared, then adjusting the rest of the preparation based on the results of a tasting is an essential skill most home cooks don’t have. Learning this skill will immediately massively improve the taste of the food the average home-cook puts out, and it will also increase the motivation to cook, the desire to try new ingredients, and the willingness to experiment and rely less and less on recipes and more and more on intuition.

Garnish your salsa with chopped fresh herbs. Cilantro is perhaps the most “traditionally Mexican” herb in this context, but I know there is a not-so-insignificant population with a genetic trait that means they perceive cilantro as having a “soapy” taste. If you fall into this category, run your knife through a bunch of parsley a few times. If you don’t, and you like cilantro, use it instead. Serve.

If you make this, be sure to leave a comment down below letting me know!

(Credit to Natasha's Kitchen)